My 11-year-old son Jack and I made the short road trip to Riverside, MO, a few weeks ago to enjoy the 2008 Kansas City Scottish Highland Games. It was our second trip to the Games, and as expected, we had a great time.
Early Saturday morning, I bumped into fellow TSAS member Laurie Hay who, along with her husband and TSAS member Bruce, is a convener for Clan Hay. She was busy helping apply last minute touches to the Clan Hay table in the ClanVillage. We visited briefly about the Games and the festivities, and I mentioned that I am beginning to seriously consider what I want to do and where I want to go on my first-ever trip to Scotland. I said that I had really developed a deep connection to my Scottish and Celtic heritage. She said she felt the same way.
“There’s something about Scotland that other places just don’t have,” she said. “Scotland truly calls you home.” Those words have resonated with me since that morning, and they also helped me understand a powerful experience I’d had nearly a year before at the 2007 Games.
The year before, on my first visit to the games, my wife, oldest son Alex (then 15), Jack (then 10) and I were standing in a line to get lunch on Saturday. The park was very crowded, and since it was noon, the lines for the food vendors were long. Then, from a distance of about 100 yards, I heard pipes and drums. Lots of them. It was a massed band – players from Topeka, Omaha, Kansas City, all over the area – taking the field.
Now, understand that you can’t swing a dead cat at the KC Scottish Highland Games without hitting a piper. You can always hear a piper or even a pipe band of 8-10 players at any given time. But this was different. This was 75 players, maybe more. I’d never witnessed a massed band in person. I’d never heard anything like it before.
My wife tells me – I don’t remember this – that I just said, “I have to go.” I absently stepped out of the food line and walked toward the sound of the pipes. Jack tagged along.
When we got to the marching field, I was nearly overwhelmed. All of them were proudly donning the tartans of their pipe band or their clan. They had finished their first marching tune, and a lone piper began playing, “Amazing Grace.” When the rest of the pipers joined in, the tune touched a place deep inside me that had been touched just a few times before. Two of those times were the births of my sons. I was transfixed. Jack looked up at me and asked, “Dad, what’s wrong?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about until I realized tears were streaming down my face. I wasn’t sad, though; I was overcome by a tremendous swell of pride. There was more to it, though, and it took me awhile to put my finger on it. Eventually, it came to me: on some level, I felt homesick. The pipes had managed to make a guy from Topeka, KS, who’s never been farther east than Baltimore homesick. I still haven’t figured that out!
The band played a few more familiar tunes and marched off the field to Scotland the Brave. The tears quickly dried, but the feeling of pride I experienced that day has stayed with me and within me since.
Maybe it’s that music, the distinctive sound of the pipes, that calls to us.Perhaps it’s the traditions of Alba. It may be Scotland’s diverse and proud history that, to me, can’t be rivaled by any other nation.
And for some of us, maybe it’s simply because, well, Scotland truly is home.
Regardless of the “how,” the important thing is that Scotland “does” – this great nation, her amazing people, her proud traditions truly do call us home. If you draw half as much pride and satisfaction from your celebration of your Scots heritage as I do mine, you may well be the proudest person your friends know. Beannachd Dia dhuit.
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